Metal Refinery

Metal Refinery is a Refinement Building, which serves the purpose of turning Metal Ore into Refined Metal, as well as producing alloys. It produces a lot of heat, and dumps part of it into coolant liquid.

Mechanics
A Metal Refinery requires a Liquid Intake and Output Pipes, 400 kg of Liquid as a coolant (stores 800 kg, and can accept 400 more while the task is scheduled), Duplicant operation, and 1.2 kW of Power. It refines metals 100 kg at a time, leaving the Refined Metal on the floor at 40 °C, as well as producing 16 kDTU/s of heat and outputting 400 kg of coolant at a higher temperature. The heat added to the coolant is 80% of the heat required to heat the refined metal from 40 °C to its melting point. Recipes take 40 seconds but it can be reduced by the Machinery attribute.

While the Metal Refinery can operate with just 400 kg of coolant, it is advised to supply 800-1200 kg so that it can operate continuously.

Choosing Coolant Liquid
Liquids where the temperature increment is bigger than the temperature range between solid and gaseous transition are struck out. Liquids that can only perform one operation at a time are underlined.

Liquids that cannot be obtained outside of sandbox mode are not listed. These are Helium, Mercury, and Propane.

All temperature ranges are 6 degrees larger than expected, since materials need to go 3°C beyond a phase change temperature to actually change their state.

All values are truncated to 2 decimal places.

Tips

 * Even one Metal Refinery can generate enough heat to run Steam Turbine, and is power-positive when making aluminum, niobium, iron, or steel even with a duplicant with low machinery attribute.
 * However, assuming that the output coolant would be used to heat steam through Radiant Liquid Piping, this requires the use of coolant that can be heated up to 125 degrees and above; either Water or Polluted Water will be unsuitable, and the earliest practical coolant is Crude Oil.
 * In the Spaced Out (DLC), getting a coolant that can do this is even more difficult, due to the starting asteroid lacking any Oil Biome. The earliest possible coolant would have to obtained from melting Plastic, and using the resultant Naphtha.
 * In practice this may only be possible on the Sandstone starting asteroid as the Swampy starting asteroid does not have dreckos to ranch.
 * Otherwise, an Aquatuner will be needed to extract heat from the coolant; the power needed to run the Aquatuner would balance out any gains from having a Steam Turbine convert heat to electricity.
 * Due to its massive energy drain assigning a skilled operator to it and even placing a light-source nearby goes a long way in terms of efficiency.
 * When coolant containing Germs is used, each time Metal Refinery finishes refining, it gains surface germs and must be disinfected, which is not very practical.

History
Металлургический завод